112 UNCLE TOM’S CABIN; OR, |

‘‘He’s a shocking creature, isn’t he—this trader? go unfeeling !
It’s dreadful, really !” .

‘Oh, but nobody thinks anything of these traders ! They are
universally despised—never received into any decent society.”

But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame?
The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the
system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor
trader himself? You make the public sentiment that calls for,
his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame
in it; and in what are you better than he?

Are you educated and he ignorant, you high and he low, you
refined and he coarse, you talented and he simple ?

In the day of a future Judgment these very considerations may
make it more tolerable for him than you.

In concluding these little incidents of lawful trade, we must
beg the world not to think that American legislators are entirely
destitute of humanity, as perhaps might be unfairly inferred from
the great efforts made in our national body to protect and perpe-
tuate this species of traffic.

Who does not know how our great men are outdoing them-
selves in declaiming against the Soreign slave-trade? There are a
perfect host of Clarksons and Wilberforces risen up among us on
that subject most edifying to hear and behold. Trading negroes
from Africa, dear reader, is-so horrid! It is not to be thought
of! But trading them from Kentucky—that’s quite another
thing!

CHAPTER XIII.
THE QUAKER SETTLEMENT.

A QUIET scene now rises before us. A large, roomy, neatly-
painted kitchen, its yellow floor glossy and smooth, and without a
particle of dust ; a neat and well-blacked cooking-stove; rows of
shining tin, suggestive of unmentionable good things to the appe-
tite; glossy green wood chairs, old and firm; a small flag-bot-
tomed rocking-chair, with a patch-work cushion in it, neatly con-
trived out of small pieces of different coloured woollen goods, and
a larger sized one, motherly and old, whose wide arms breathed
hospitable invitation, seconded by the solicitations of its feather
cushions—a real, comfortable, persuasive old chair, and worth, in
the way of honest, homely enjoyment, a dozen of your plush or
brochetelle drawing-room gentry; and in the chair, gently sway-
ing back and forward, her eyes bent on some fine sewing, sat our
old frend Eliza. Yes, there she is, paler and thinner than in

_ her Kentucky home, with a world of quiet sorrow lying under the